It's that time of year again: Shadows grow long, winds turn chilly, and we're closer and closer to All Hallows Eve and Día de Muertos, when the thinly spun spider-web of a veil between the living and the dead falls away like flesh on a zombie. And that means it's time for scary stories!

As in years gone by, we'd love for you to share your spine-shivering tales of terror. True, weird, freaky, scary stories that happened to you (or a friend/family member). Did you live in a house you were sure was haunted? Did you experience an inexplicable phenomenon? Sickening sense of déja vu? Encounter an evil inanimate object? Confront a demon or spirit? We want to know. And we'll post the freakiest ones on Halloween.

We've read through your ghost stories and picked out ten of our favorites. Read on for tales…
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For inspiration, here's a terrifying tale, via MrsAmy, from last year:

This didn't happen to me, but it happened to my aunt and it's so freaky I'll never…
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This didn't happen to me, but it happened to my aunt and it's so freaky I'll never forget it.

My aunt and uncle bought a cool old Victorian in a small town about forty miles away from Austin. It was really a pretty awesome old place and had a historical marker in the front lawn and everything. My aunt and uncle moved for job reasons years ago, and the house is now a successful Bed and Breakfast. Why anyone would pay money to sleep there is beyond me, though.

When my aunt and uncle were still living in the house, their daughter and her young son also lived with them. Chad, the son, was about seven at the time.

One day, my aunt was home alone - uncle and her daughter were both at work, Chad was a school, the lady who cleaned the house had already come and gone for the day. My aunt was in the study, working a project or something. In this house, if you sat at the desk in the study, you had clear view of the foot of the stairs.

She was sitting there on the computer, when she looked up and saw a young boy sitting a the foot of the stairs, staring at her. He was about the same age as Chad, and she assumed he was a friend from school. She asked the kid his name and he didn't answer. She thought he was weird, so she told him he needed to be in school or to go on home. She looked down for a second, and when she looked up, he was gone.

When Chad got home from school that day, she told him one of his friends had been in the house. He said no way, all my friends were at school with me. She described the boy, and Chad got real quiet. He said, oh yeah. I know him. He comes out of my closet to play sometimes at night. Unnerved, my aunt and cousin told him to go play outside and stop telling wild stories.

A couple of months later, my aunt was doing research on the history of the house and found out that a young boy, aged eight, had died there of leukemia in the 70's. She found an old newspaper article about his death, with a picture she recognized. He was the same boy who had been staring at her on the stairs that day.